The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation
"I wonder if the people would like to hear me, I can tell my experience,"
I said. I asked her to tell Mr. Duminel, my lawyer, to come to
my cell. I told him of it, and he said he would call the commissioners
together and would have them let me out by paying my fines by monthly
installments. This he did. So Mr. Furlong sent the money needed and
Dr. Harding and Mrs. Goodwin collected seventy dollars from my friends
to help me out. When I got to Kansas City, I lacked fifty cents of having
enough money to pay for my ticket east, so I borrowed that of the man
at the fruit stand in the depot. In about a week from that I spoke at
Atlantic City for the Philadelphia American, the proceeds being used to
give the poor children an outing. Thousands of people were present.
I never made a note or wrote a sentence for the platform in my life.
Have spoken extemporaneously from the first and often went on the
platform when I could not have told what I was to say to save my life,
and for several weeks God compelled me to open my Bible at random and
speak from what my eyes fell on. I have literally proved that: "You
shall not think of what you shall speak but it shall be given in that
hour." The best thoughts have come to me after being asleep, waking
in the night or in the morning.
The way I happened to think of a hatchet as a souvenir, some one
brought me one and told me I ought to carry them. I then selected a
pattern and got a party in Providence, R. I., to make them. These have
been a great financial aid to me; helped me pay my fines and expenses.
People have often bought them from me, at my prison cell window. I
sell them everywhere I go.
The summer of 1902 I was at Coney Island, speaking in Steeple-
Chase Park, and a man was very insulting to me, and always took occasion
to say something against women. I can scarcely remember how it was,
but I broke or smashed his show case of cigars and cigarettes. I knew
I would have to pay for it, but I did not mind paying for the object lesson
that it would be, for tobacco is a poison, and the use of it is a vice.
I was arrested, stood my trial and was being sent to jail, when Mr.
Tilyou, Manager of Steeple-Chase Park, took me from the "Black Maria."
The policeman who had the prisoners in charge was purple and bloated
from beer drinking, he wanted me to go in a place in the front that was
already crowded with women. I refused and he struck me on the hand
that was holding to the iron bars of the little window and broke a bone,
causing it to swell up. I said: "Never mind, you beer-swelled, whiskey-
soaked saturn faced man, God will strike you." In six weeks from that
time this man fell dead on the streets of Coney Island. This was the
first time I every had handcuffs on. I saw in this experience in Police
Courts in Coney Island what I never saw before, eight or ten women
sentenced for drunkenness; one the mother of five children, and the
others nice looking young ladies, and most of them were weeping. When
they received their sentences there would be a smothered laugh from the
audience of bloated men present, and I turned and said: "Shame on you,
for laughing at the sorrows of these poor women." I thought how heartless
it was for men to laugh at the disgrace of women. I got out by
paying for the destruction of the cigar case.
I was very successful and made enough money to pay $125 a month
to have my SMASHER'S MAIL published in the form of a magazine,
but having no one in Topeka that could edit the magazine, doing justice
to me, I returned and closed the business.
CHAPTER X.
LEGAL STATUS OF PROHIBITION AND JOINT SMASHING,
The very highest judicial authority, the Supreme Court of the Nation,
has made a most radical ruling, towit: "No legislature can bargain
away the public health or the public morals. The people themselves cannot
do it, much less their servants. Government is organized with a view
to their preservation and cannot divest itself of the power to provide
for them."--101 U. S. 816.
No state, therefore, can license or legalize immorality, vice or crime.
All such efforts are treason to society and organized government.
Again, the Supreme Court of the United States has declared: "If
the public safety or the public morals require the discontinuance of any
manufacture or traffic, the hand of the legislature cannot be stayed from
providing for its discontinuance, by any incidental inconvenience which
individuals or corporations may suffer."--97 U. S. 32. Thus the legislature
of any state can confiscate property by wholesale if necessary for
the protection of the community. Powder mills, slaughter houses and
pest houses, necessary institutions, are frequently so condemned and
rendered absolutely worthless.
The Federal Supreme Court gives ample power to all states to enforce
this great fundamental principle. It says: "The state cannot by any
contract limit the exercise of her power to the prejudice of the public
health and the public morals."--111 U. S. 751.
Speaking specifically, a sweeping decision of the highest tribunal of
the land, is as follows: "There is no inherent right in a citizen to thus
sell intoxicating liquors by retail; it is not a privilege of a citizen of a
state or a citizen of the United States."--137 U. S. 86.
No state or citizen of the United States then has any power, authority
or right to vend intoxicating liquors at all.
That there may be no misconception or misconstruction, in a case
from Kansas, this final court of appeal in American jurisprudence, said:
"For we cannot shut out of view the fact, within the knowledge of all,
that the public health, the public morals, and the public safety may be
endangered by the general use of intoxicating drinks; nor the fact,
established by statistics accessible to everyone, that the idleness,
disorder, pauperism, and crime existing in the country are, in some
degree at least, traceable to the evil,"--Mugler vs. Kansas, 123 U. S. 623.
And again: "The statistics of every state show a greater amount
of crime and misery attributable to the use of ardent spirits obtained at
these liquor saloons than to any other source."--137 U. S. 86.
Hon. Justice Grier said: "It is not necessary to array the appalling
statistics of misery, pauperism, and crime that have their origin in the use
and abuse of ardent spirits. The police power, which is exclusively in
the state, is competent to the correction of these great evils, and all
measures of restraint or prohibition necessary to effect that purpose are
within the scope of that authority, and if a loss of revenue should accrue
to the United States, from a diminished consumption of ardent spirits, she
will be a gainer a thousand-fold in health, wealth and happiness of the
people."--5 Howard 532.
These far-reaching decisions settle forever the disloyalty and un-
Americanism of any state or citizen presuming to authorize or condone
liquor selling. The whole license system of the United States is clearly
illegal and unconstitutional.
Abraham Lincoln interpreted the Constitution right, when he wrote
the Emancipation Proclamation. The Presidents of the United States
are oath bond to enforce it, and the license to vend intoxicating liquors
as unconstitutional. Mr. Roosevelt is violating his oath to allow this
business to continue. He has the same right and more cause than Abraham
Lincoln to cancel every license, and shut up every brewery and distillery
in the United States. God says, "Woe to the crown of pride, to
the drunkards--Yes, this thing at the head of the nation is cursed--Look
at the assassinated Presidents, since the license was given by the Republican
Party in 1863. Lincoln refused to put his name to the bill at
first, but was over persuaded to do so by those parties who said it was
to pay a war debt, and when that was done, the license would be revoked,
but poor, honest Abe Lincoln was not suffered to undo the wrong he
was persuaded to commit. Every drunkard's wife and drunkard's mother
and child ought to bring suit against the Government, for the durgging,
poisoning and murdering of their loved ones. A man can recover if his
wife's affections are alienated from him, a person can recover damages
even, if he injures his foot on a defective sidewalk--the inference is clear.
And now let us look at the Legal Status of Joint Smashing. Let
every lawyer, judge and law-abiding person read carefully the following:
Kansas, true to the doctrines enunciated above, and loyal to the best
welfare of her populace, enacted constitutional prohibition forbidding the
sale of ardent spirits.
Section 14 of the Prohibitory Law reads: "It shall be the duty of
all sheriffs and constables, in their respective counties and townships, to
file complaints and make arrests for violation of this act, whenever they
shall be informed of the violation thereof, and any such officer who shall
neglect or refuse to file such complaint or make such arrest, upon being
informed of the omission of such offense, shall be subject to a fine not
exceeding $100, and his office shall be vacant: Providing that no such
officer shall in any event be liable for costs of such prosecution."
Hence, it is not necessary that the private citizen drum up evidence,
swear out warrants and prosecute liquor drug-stores and joints. That
is what officials are elected and paid for and if officers fail to abate
these liquor venders, then the duty devolves back on the patriotic citizen.
This decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, carried
up from Vermont, Spaulding vs. Preston, 21 p. 9, towit: "If any member
of the body politic instead of putting his property to honest uses,
converts it into an engine to injure the life, liberty, health, morals, peace
or property of others, he can, I apprehend, sustain no action against one
who withholds or destroys his property with the bona fide intention of
preventing injury to himself or others."
In Kansas every liquor selling place is not only a declared nuisance,
but a constitutional outlaw. And in the case from Pennsylvania
where a private individual had abated a nuisance, the court held: "We
consider it also well settled, as is claimed by this defendant, that a common
nuisance may be removed, or, in legal language, abated by any individual.
Any man, says Lord Hale, may justify the removal of a common
nuisance, either by land or by Nyater, because every man is concerned in
it."
It is not only the privilege of the patriotic citizen to abate a dangerous
nuisance but it is commendable. Bishop on Criminal Law, paragraph
1081, says: "This doctrine (of abatement of a public nuisance by an
individual) is an expression of the better instincts of our natures, which
lead men to watch over and shield one another from harm."
"The buildings, premises and paraphernalia of a nuisance are not
legitimate property and have no rights in law. Damages cannot be recovered
for their destruction by an individual. The question of malice does
not enter into the case at all."
I Bishop's Criminal Law 828; I Hilliard on Torts, 605.
"At common law it was always the right of a citizen, without official
authority, to abate a public nuisance, and without waiting to have it
adjudged such by legal tribunal. His right to do so depended upon the
fact of its being a nuisance. If be assumed to act upon his own adjudication
that it was, and such adjudication was afterwards shown to be
wrong, he was liable as a wrong-doer for his error, and appropriate damages
could be recovered against him. This common law right still exists
in full force. Any citizen, acting either as an individual or as a public
official under the orders of local or municipal authorities, whether such
orders be or be not in pursuance of special legislation or charter provisions,